My Highlights from NADA Miami Beach 2014
There is an alternative to the standard Western tradition of postwar artmaking. The significance of the internet and the mediation of technology as it has entered our lives has created two primary forces: a desire for the simplicity of a society rooted in the tradition of human experience, and an abundant desire to push forward and find new languages and methods of artmaking and discourse, through the acceptance and utilization of everyday technologies as offered up through the network to which we are all interconnected.
My Selection:
Jaakko Pallasvuo, FORMAT WALLS MOSH FOAMS MALTS WHORLS, 2014, at Future Gallery
Jaakko Pallasvuo is a super talented Finnish artist, whose explorations of the world through video, ceramics, and digital painting offer up a position of social awareness and anxiety in the internet age. I must admit I love these paintings and I think they have a significant place in the conversation of digital painting in the post-internet age.
Petra Cortright, Call Trees VC++, 2014, at Foxy Production
The powerhouse female artist of the post-internet movement. These digital paintings are an immersion in painting in the digital age. Complex, painterly, and simply awesome to look at, these works bring game to all male painters out there and finally start the conversation that painting, pigment, and paintbrushes have worthy competition in the digital age. Not to mention Cortright’s immensely important video work, which provides a window into the world of a young female artist growing up in the internet era—this artist is here to stay. I suggest you get to NADA early on this one; it will be a tough ticket to get.
Jon Rafman at Zach Feuer Gallery
Keep this one safe. Jon Rafman in my opinion is a generationally important artist. His extensive practice across all media—including the important Nine Eyes of Google Street Viewproject, the 3D-printed busts, the “New Age Demanded” series and his super important video and documentary work will place Rafman in the history books. He is a young artist who if you have not heard of him, do your homework, and if you don’t collect the works, you better start before it is too late.
Brian Kokoska, Double Life (Coral Test), 2014, at East Hampton Shed
These weird and wacky figurations of monster heads are a sojourn into the reproduction of monstrous figuration. Kokoska is a recently discovered young artist whose sculptural works, coupled with his odd paintings, point to the start of a career filled with potential and possibility.
Bjorn Copeland, Compress/Sustain Print Error, 2014, at China Art Objects Galleries
Bjorn Copeland is an artist whose works I have followed for some time. This new body of work is an appropriated large-scale advertisement—a printed banner off the streets—that has been crumpled into that painters’ space, the rectangle. They have this cubist reference taking cheap advertising tarps off the street and giving them 21st-century fast food kind of Georges Braque treatment. They are a breakthrough for an artist who has migrated west and been liberated from his East Coast domain where he can play with scale and the banality of the American language of advertising that one experiences so often as one lives in the car, driving through streets and freeways.
Margo Wolowiec, Pack Lightly, 2014, at Anat Ebgi
Margo is weaving post-internet language into textile-based works that represent that cacophony of imagery in our daily lives, trapped in the ancient craft of a modernized process of printing: dye sublimation prints on textile. These innovative works integrate the tradition and modernity of production, enhanced by technology, within a practice that is producing work that warrants a word most artists hate having ascribed to their work: sublime.
Joel Holmberg, Gift of Fear, 2014, at American Contemporary
Joel Holmberg is an artist solidly participating in the overused and often misused, but useful, attribution of post internet. An immensely intelligent and sophisticated artist, Holmberg’s works are a big step in the continuing direction of a young artist making intelligent work and progressing in leaps and bounds.
Unattributed Tantric Painting, Untitled, ca. 2000, at Adams and Ollman
These “Tantric” drawings are a tasty bite of timeless, nameless art. Produced in a tradition passed through families and artists who study this ancient craft, these works remind us that our Western traditions of artmaking—which fetishize the artist—have strong roots in cultures that fetishize the art itself, whilst the makers lie in the obscurity of hidden and respected tradition. It is wonderful seeing this work at NADA. A terrific and far less expensive alternative to a lovely work on paper by Louise Bourgeois.
